Best Time Ever with Neil Patrick Harris

A bold, bedazzled, cheesy-as-hell and inevitably polarizing attempt to revive the variety hour.

The premiere of Best Time Ever was a truly chaotic series of stunts, and enjoyment of it probably derives from just how staged you thought the audience interaction was. Either way, at a certain point it had a manic energy no other variety show of recent decades has come close to capturing, and that in itself is a strange sort of achievement.

It did not come up with any great answers, but it was trying something new, something strange, something energetic, something involving Neil Patrick Harris dancing to Pitbull while playing bartender in a choreographed dance routine, pouring drinks for a child dressed up like Neil Patrick Harris.... The vibe of the show to come: feckless, pointless, sweet.

The episode only sparked to life when Harris and guest announcer Reese Witherspoon engaged in a climbing stunt, which left the actress looking understandably flustered. What the series couldn’t sustain, the efforts of Harris and the wildly appreciative studio audience notwithstanding, was any consistent sense of spontaneity.

[Neil Patrick Harris was] hampered here by a format that might work better on daytime TV than at night, and better in the U.K. than here, and by gimmicks that seem more in step with the Velveeta spirit of "America's Got Talent," and by a show that's almost willfully aggravating, he may have met his match with Best Time Ever.

While the show, which is broadcast live, hit most of its marks logistically, and was busy and noisy enough to keep a viewer's attention, it often felt half-baked.

I like the idea of Best Time Ever and would love to see this and Maya Rudolph's variety thing and even live episodes of Undateable encourage more network risk-taking. For that to happen, future episodes will have to be the best time ever for more than just Neil Patrick Harris.

Tepid jokes and manufactured festiveness made up most of the evening. The multitalented Mr. Harris didn’t really dazzle until late in the show, when he did a back flip off a pogo stick, a small payoff.

Its ratio of energetic, entertaining segments to time-wasting, self-indulgent filler (on the part of Harris) just doesn't pencil out in the audience's favor.

Forced and frantic, what Best Time most often relied upon Tuesday night was the minimal pleasure of watching people be good sports--coupled with a seemingly unshakeable belief that seeing celebrities have fun is fun in and of itself.

Most of what has made Harris a beloved fixture of live telecasts has been eradicated in this misguided attempt at revising the variety show format.

I liked that Best Time Ever was big and loud and frenetic and ambitious. I just wish I could have suspended my disbelief for even one segment.

The NBC show, premiering Tuesday felt forced, awkward and phony. But most of all, it made you feel embarrassed for its over-eager host.